“I mean, where’s Abden’s head?”
Annoyed, Kelder turned to point. “The head’s right...”
He stopped.
Slowly, he turned back to Asha.
“I don’t know,” he said. “What does... what did your brother look like?”
“I don’t know,” Asha said.
“That one,” Kelder said, pointing to the nearest pike, “is that him?”
“No,” Asha said, “that’s Kelder — I mean, the other Kelder, Kelder the Lesser, they called him.”
“Well, I knew it wasn’t me,” Kelder snarled sarcastically. “What about the others? Which one is he?”
Asha took a minute to peer up at those heads that were visible from where they stood. “I don’t see Abden,” she said at last.
The head was not right there, Kelder realized.
“Damn!” he said again.
Chapter Sixteen
“Now, how many heads are there?” Kelder asked himself, as he scanned the skies for Irith. “Nobody’s about to take a severed head inside his wagon at night, not if he’s sleeping there — that would be too creepy, just asking to be haunted.” He glanced down at Asha, hoping for some useful suggestion, but all he saw was that she was on the verge of tears. He quickly turned his gaze upward again.
“No one would take one inside,” he said, still addressing himself, “so they’re all out here on the wagons, and it’s just a matter of finding the right one, right?”
Asha made a muffled noise of agreement.
Kelder frowned. It was just a matter of finding the right one, but Asha was the only one who could do that, since she was the only one who knew her brother’s face.
Irith must have realized this by now — so where was she? Why hadn’t she come back for further instructions? All he could see was a small bird, silhouetted against the lesser moon as it climbed the eastern sky.
He shrugged, and looked down at Asha. “We’ll have to sneak up as close as we can, and see if we can find the right... uh... the right pike. Then we’ll tell Irith which one it is...”
There was a sudden flapping of wings, and Irith was descending, a few feet away.
“Kelder,” she said angrily, “I don’t know which head!”
“We just thought of that,” Kelder agreed.
“So what do we do?”
“Can you carry Asha when you fly? Then she could point it out.”
Irith looked the girl over, considering, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not a chance.”
Kelder had expected that. “All right, then,” he said. “We sneak Asha up as close as we can on foot, and let her look until she finds the right one.”
“Maybe Irith could get all of them?” Asha suggested. “Then we could go back and burn all the bodies...”
She realized that both Kelder and Irith were glaring at her, and her voice faded away.
“No,” Irith said. “Just one.”
“All right,” Asha said. “I’ll go look. But I can’t go alone.”
“Of course not,” Kelder agreed.
Irith glanced over at the wagons, the patchwork of light and shadow, the big man scraping away bits of wood with his knife.
“You two go ahead,” she said. “I’ll wait here.”
Kelder started to agree, then paused. Irith was the one who had to know just where the head was, after all. But it wasn’t worth the argument. “All right,” he said. “Come on, Asha.”
Together, the two crept closer.
There were a dozen wagons; the guard stood beside the seventh in line, by Kelder’s quick count, and they had approached near the ninth. “This way,” he hissed, beckoning Asha toward the front of the column.
After all, there were more wagons in that direction, even if it was farther to go.
The head on the eighth wagon was facing the opposite direction, but Asha shook her own head no; the hair was wrong.
The next faced them, but again, Asha indicated that it was not the one they wanted. They were both tiptoeing now; if the guard happened to look up from his whittling, and if he weren’t blinded by the tangle of shadows and torchlight, he would be looking right at them.
The head on the sixth wagon was facing away, and Asha was not completely sure, but didn’t think it looked like Abden.
Kelder was beginning to think they should have turned the other way and checked the tail end first when Asha made a strangled noise.
“That’s it,” she said, pointing. “That’s Abden.”
The fifth wagon was green trimmed with gold, and the Ethsharitic runes on the side said something about someone named Doran of someplace — Ship-something, safe place for ships, something like that; Kelder did not bother to puzzle the whole thing out. It was obviously the name of some Ethsharitic merchant. The pike at the front corner displayed the head of a young man, and Kelder thought there might be some resemblance to Asha, but he wasn’t sure he wasn’t just imagining it.
“All right,” he whispered. “Let’s go back and tell Irith.”
Asha nodded, turned, and began to scamper back.
Her bare feet slapped on the paving stones. Kelder started after her, and had taken perhaps three long steps when something registered.
He turned, and saw that the guard had lowered his knife and carving and was peering out into the gloom, following the sound of Asha’s footsteps.
Kelder decided that he didn’t want to be seen just yet. He fell back into a nearby shadow, under the overhang of a two-story shopfront.
“Irith?” Asha called. “Where are you?”
Kelder hissed to himself with exasperation.
“Irith?” Asha called again, more loudly.
She was standing, Kelder thought, at about the spot where they had separated, plainly visible in the light of the two moons. The guard was watching her intently now.
What’s more, another guard, whom they had not previously seen, had heard the sound and was peering between the wagons from the other side of the caravan. This one was tall and thin, with a black beard that needed trimming — it straggled messily down onto his chest.
There was no sign of Irith.
A cat meowed nearby, and Kelder turned for an instant, looking for the animal, but didn’t see it. He turned quickly back to Asha.
“Kelder!” a breathy voice said behind him, quietly.
He started, and turned to find Irith standing there, finger to her lips.
“How did you...” he began.
“Which one?” Irith whispered hoarsely.
“Which what?” For a moment he thought she was asking something about the two guards, and he tried to figure out what she wanted to know.
“Which wagon, stupid?”
“Oh,” Kelder said, collecting his wits. “The green one, right there.” He pointed.
Irith nodded, and spread wings that had not been there an instant before. “You go distract them,” she said.
Then she launched herself fluttering upward.
Kelder blinked and looked up, watching her ascent.
“Irith?” Asha wailed. “Kelder?”
Kelder frowned; the best distraction was probably the simplest, he decided. He stepped out of the shadows. “Over here,” he called. He trotted toward the little girl, who was standing alone in the street, on the verge of panic.
The first guard had stepped away from the pillar and tucked his carving under his belt. Now he slid his knife into its sheath and picked up the spear. The other guard was between two of the wagons now, facing away, scanning the little plaza on that side of the arcade.
Kelder tried hard not to be seen looking at either of them as he came up to Asha and said, a little more loudly than necessary, “Here I am, Indra.”